The foreign origins and terminology of the Hatt-i Hümayun stirred even greater resentment among Muslim clerics and conservatives. Even the old Tanzimat reformer Mustafa Reshid – who returned for a brief spell as Grand Vizier after Stratford had insisted on his reappointment in November 1856 – thought it went too far in its concessions to the Christians. Angered by the Hatt-i Hümayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Hümayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.22
Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Hümayun.
In Nablus, to take just one example, the troubles began on 4 April, shortly after Muslim leaders had denounced the Hatt-i Hümayun at Friday prayers. There were 5,000 Christians in Nablus, a town of 10,000 people, and before the Crimean War they had lived peacefully with the Muslims. But the war had increased tensions between them. The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Christians, for their part, saw it as an allied triumph. They raised French and British flags on their houses in Nablus and placed a new bell over the Protestant mission school. These were provocations to Islamic sentiment. At Friday prayers, the ulemas condemned these signs of Western domination, arguing that Muslims would soon be called to prayer by the English bell, unless they rose up to destroy the Christian churches, which, they said, would be ‘a proper form of prayer to God’. Calling for jihad, crowds spilled out onto the streets of Nablus, many of them gathering by the Protestant mission, where they tore down the British flag.
